Comment by nekooooo
3 days ago
i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.
3 days ago
i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.
One of the early DAWs (long forgot the name of it) had an interface that recreated the look of a flatbed with animated reels. It ran on an old monochrome green/black monitor. I saw this in the mid-90s and was already used to seeing a waveform in timelines, so this thing really felt ancient. Apparently, the makers felt sound editors would be unable to grasp a new interface???
Isn't it a thing for DAW developers to strive for a real-world-looking interface? What I hate is knob re-creations!
Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).
Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
[1] https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/
2 replies →
This didn't look real. It looks like what we'd consider a TUI today
don't knobs also serve a practical purpose since otherwise you'd have a ton of horizontal sliders, which would quickly crowd the interface?
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